Sean “Diddy” Combs is determined to get out of prison by any means necessary.
On Tuesday (December 23), Combs’ legal team filed an appeal demanding for his conviction to be overturned and for him to be released from prison.
The team argued that Combs received a sentence three times longer than he should have, despite acquittals on more serious charges, because “the district judge acted as a thirteenth juror.”
At the very least, the lawyers are asking for Combs’ sentence to be reduced.
He is currently serving a 50-month prison sentence on two interstate prostitution convictions. The summer a jury convicted Combs on two counts of transportation to engage in prostitution. He was acquitted on two more serious charges: racketeering conspiracy and sex trafficking by force, fraud or coercion.
The lawyer also states that during sentencing, District Judge Arun Subramanian incorrectly said that he could consider Combs’ behavior related to the violent charges, but he was acquitted of those.
“The judge defied the jury’s verdict and found Combs ‘coerced,’ ‘exploited,’ and ‘forced’ his girlfriends to have sex and led a criminal conspiracy. These judicial findings trumped the verdict and led to the highest sentence ever imposed for any remotely similar defendant — even though most others, unlike Combs, ran prostitution businesses that exploited poor or undocumented women or minors,” the filing states, via Page Six.
His legal team says they believe the bulk of the government’s evidence from the trial “would have been irrelevant and inadmissible” if Combs was only charged with the two Mann Act counts he was convicted of.
“Yet the district court — determined to punish Combs for the acquitted counts — considered all that evidence anyway. It did not even follow its own proposed test,” the docs read.
They are calling it a violation of Combs constitutional rights, asking for “immediate release and either grant a judgment of acquittal or vacate and remand for resentencing.”
Federal prosecutors still have time to respond before the case can possibly go to the appellate court.
The 2nd Circuit rarely overturns district court rulings.
The U.S. government’s brief in the appeals process is due by Feb. 20, and Combs’ team’s reply is due by March 13.